Header Menu

by Bruce Maulden

Menu

Pinocchio’s Plight — Lying Between a Rock and a Hard Place

August 1, 2014

Ground fog and a chilled air makes for an exciting early morning here on California’s north coast, and what makes this particular day so titillating is that it’s Friday! Frick, I been waiting for this.

Events this week proves the US is not the exceptional place we were all told repeatedly it was, and not only that, apparently in the nowadays, lying just means you have to say, ‘I’m sorry.’ Or whatever: After briefing committee leaders, Brennan “apologized to them for such actions by CIA officers as described in the [inspector general’s] report,” the agency’s statement said. And that’s John Brennan, asshole director of the CIA.

Okay — Brennan last March: “As far as the allegations of the CIA hacking into Senate computers, nothing could be further from the truth…,” and further more, the august members of the US Senate should refrain from producing “…spurious allegations about CIA actions that are wholly unsupported by the facts.” Yeah, right — famous last lying words.

And the pious screams and shouts were all about the lying — via McClatchy:

An internal CIA investigation confirmed allegations that agency personnel improperly intruded into a protected database used by Senate Intelligence Committee staff to compile a scathing report on the agency’s detention and interrogation program, prompting bipartisan outrage and at least two calls for spy chief John Brennan to resign. “This is very, very serious, and I will tell you, as a member of the committee, someone who has great respect for the CIA, I am extremely disappointed in the actions of the agents of the CIA who carried out this breach of the committee’s computers,” said Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., the committee’s vice chairman. The rare display of bipartisan fury followed a three-hour private briefing by Inspector General David Buckley. His investigation revealed that five CIA employees, two lawyers and three information technology specialists improperly accessed or “caused access” to a database that only committee staff were permitted to use. Buckley’s inquiry also determined that a CIA crimes report to the Justice Department alleging that the panel staff removed classified documents from a top-secret facility without authorization was based on “inaccurate information,” according to a summary of the findings prepared for the Senate and House intelligence committees and released by the CIA. In other conclusions, Buckley found that CIA security officers conducted keyword searches of the emails of staffers of the committee’s Democratic majority — and reviewed some of them — and that the three CIA information technology specialists showed “a lack of candor” in interviews with Buckley’s office.

All this bullshit is off the CIA’s mainstay of torture, which this week insights were revealed into what makes up the twisted work of our government. And today, the White House is supposed present Congress with the absolute-final, declassified playback on the Senate’s investigation into CIA interrogation, though, the Company’s actions won’t be called “torture” — ‘…an accusation that could have political, diplomatic, legal, and even criminal implications.‘ And we can’t have that. Some of the findings of the report have been leaked already, but: “The American people will be profoundly disturbed about what will be revealed in this report,” Sen. Ron Wyden, a member of the committee who has been vocal in his criticism of the CIA, told The Daily Beast this week.

Disturbed, but not legally enough disturbed. Yet what’s the real shock — Brennan’s boss, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, lied to Congress last year, laughed about it, and then later said he was sorry. Even President Obama wouldn’t touch the lie with a 10-foot-nose: “He (Clapper) had a classified program that he couldn’t talk about and he was in an open hearing in which he was asked, he was prompted to disclose a program, and so he felt that he was caught between a rock and a hard place.”

Lying, of course, has always been a problem in Washington. But especially after the 9/11 terror attacks, the Bush-Cheney regime took lying to new post-Nixon heights. Maybe even pre-Nixon. When I sat down to write my last “White House Watch” column for the Washington Post, what struck me most about the Bush years were the lies. The most consequential, of course, were the lies about the war. The most telling were the lies to cover up the lies about the war. And the most grotesque were the lies about torture. The other thing is that there were no consequences. No one got in trouble for lying. The only semi-casualty was Scooter Libby, briefly convicted of lying while obstructing the investigation into vice president Cheney’s lies. Figuring out how to right the constitutional imbalance between the branches of government, as exposed by this CIA assault on Congress, is very complicated. But doing something about lying isn’t. You need to hold people accountable for it. History will assuredly record that President Obama lied about a number of things, particularly as he carried water for the intelligence community and the military. But he’s no Cheney. So if you’re the president, you fire everyone who lies. Starting with John Brennan.

Remember, though, the rock and the hard place — that’s where the American people are located, and we’re being crushed.